Speed calling, a service offered by many local exchange carriers, has great appeal to telephone users who frequently call the same telephone number. Upon subscribing to the speed calling service, a subscriber is designated a portion (typically, for 9-31 numbers) of the speed calling data base which serves multiple subscribers within a serving area. The subscriber can utilize his portion of the database for storing telephone numbers and corresponding abbreviated numbers to place a speed call. Once speed calling is activated, by entering a telephone number with its associated abbreviated number in the speed calling data base, future calls to this telephone number can be placed by simply dialing the abbreviated number.
The most appealing advantages of subscribing to speed calling are convenience and efficiency. Speed calling can allow a subscriber to call a telephone number by entering (by dialing, by speaking the name of the calling party, etc.) the abbreviated number which usually has significantly fewer digits (typically, two or three) than the actual telephone number (typically, seven to eleven digits). This service is also desirable because the caller is relieved from having to remember or routinely look up frequently called numbers. Furthermore, important numbers, which may not necessarily be frequently dialed (i.e., emergency numbers, fire department, police, etc.,), can be readily and easily accessed by substituting these numbers with a memorable abbreviated number (i.e., FIRE (3473), COP (267), etc.,) using speed calling.
However, the advantages offered to a speed calling subscriber are greatly diminished when the telephone number stored in the speed calling data base changes or goes out of service and thus, is rendered non-working. Once subscribers have exercised the procedure to populate their speed calling data base with telephone numbers and corresponding abbreviated numbers, they are reluctant to seek out and implement procedures to update a changed telephone number or to delete those numbers permanently out of service. Often subscribers are intimidated by hi-tech methods for implementing services such as speed calling and are apprehensive toward executing related procedures. Many subscribers perceive manual update procedures to be too involved and bothersome to warrant the trouble and anxiety of updating a non-working telephone number.
Over time, a subscriber's failure to execute manual speed calling update procedures leads to a speed calling data base populated with non-working numbers. As a result, the subscriber must resort to using conventional calling methods which entail remembering and dialing all digits of the called telephone number. Clearly, as non-working telephone numbers dominate a subscriber's memory in the speed calling data base, the advantages of speed calling, namely, convenience and efficiency, are significantly degraded such that the cost-benefit ratio does not justify subscribing to the speed calling service.
In view of the severely diminished convenience and efficiency of speed calling service when stored telephone numbers are changed or out of service, an object of my invention is to provide a method for automatically updating a network speed calling data base.